Steven Kelly, in his weblog, makes some interesting observations on open source modeling tools, based on the articles by Joe Winchester and Richard Gronback of Borland. Joe believes that there aren’t any open source modeling tools because the open source community hasn’t got around to creating them. “The stack of open source software out there has been built from the bottom up, with small nimble runtimes and tight extensible IDEs”.

Steven refutes this statement by quoting Richard. “Regarding the value-add perspective of high-cost commercial tool vendors, I'd agree this is a reason we've not seen such tooling contributed in whole to open source. This is reasonable, considering the large effort it takes to produce such tooling.”

Steven’s impression about open source and modeling is that the open source community has been strongly focused only on code. “It is stereotypically programming for Real Programmers, where the ultimate level of gurudom is to work on the Linux kernel in VI.”